Week in review: Which school board candidate has landed the most endorsements?

While most of the anxiety you’re surely feeling today is appropriately directed at the presidential race, people who care about Detroit should also be paying attention to the city’s historic school board election.

Voters on Tuesday will choose seven Detroiters to help shepherd our schools out of a difficult period that’s been defined by financial distress, academic turmoil and emergency management.

"Most important will be to choose a majority that wants to look forward, to the day when full democratic control is restored, to the elevation of educational outcomes, rather than one that wants to re-prosecute arguments of the past."Detroit Free Press

How will voters choose? A Chalkbeat review of campaign finance records found that the vast majority of the 63 candidates have raised no money at all and will be entering Election Day without tools to get their message across to voters.

To help you make sense of the candidates, we’ve compiled nine endorsement lists from the city’s major newspapers and political organizations. Read on to see which four candidates made six of the lists, as well as the rest of the week’s headlines. And — please — don’t forget to vote!

Three suburban superintendents explained why they’re urging voters to support the measure, calling it “one of the most significant and necessary investments in … public schools in generations.” But critics charge that Wayne County school leaders are misleading voters.

Critics have charged that the state’s tougher new promotion requirements for third-graders are punitive without extra resources to help kids who’ve fallen behind. But the GOP chair of the House Education Committee defended the measure, saying the state spends hundreds of millions of dollars on early literacy programs to help kids read. “The fact is that our educators are receiving adequate funding,” she wrote, “but their mind-sets and focus need to change.”

There are surely other endorsement lists that didn’t come across our radar, but the vast majority of candidates — 46 candidates, or nearly three quarters of the total — don’t appear to have outside support at all.

Chalkbeat’s national newsletter: The new testing debates look a lot like the old testing debates

Welcome to Chalkbeat’s national newsletter! We’re Matt Barnum and Sarah Darville, Chalkbeat’s national team. Our goal is to help you make sense of the messy, fascinating, often controversial efforts to improve education for poor students across the country. Want to receive this in your inbox? Subscribe here.

The big story

Betsy DeVos’s education department has been on an ESSA plan approval tear. Last week, the department approved 16 states’ (and Puerto Rico’s) plans for complying with the federal education law, bringing the total number of plans that have gotten a green light to 35.

Some of those states have promised to use new metrics, such as absences and suspension rates, to help measure schools. But underneath talk of new ideas lurks the same old debates about how to use math and English tests.

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Education news.In your inbox.

We recently talked to Harvard professor Daniel Koretz, whose new book “The Testing Charade” makes the case against the way tests were used during the Bush and Obama administrations. His concern is that ESSA doesn’t change “the basic logic of the system” — the idea that pushing schools to boost test scores will improve the schools themselves.

Critics of testing in New York echoed those concerns yesterday. State officials there had hinted that they would apply for a federal program to give their tests a more radical makeover, but this week announced that they had abandoned the plan, in part because it would have been expensive. “I am frustrated,” one opt-out advocate said.

Others are skeptical about state plans for different reasons. “States mostly produced plans that are vague and noncommittal about how they will support low-performing schools,” according to a review of by Bellwether Education Partners, a reform-oriented consulting firm.

In Memphis, the superintendent has raised the possibility of bringing charter operators into struggling district schools. That’s a big shift, since the district has battled openly with the charter sector. The state’s Achievement School District has been absorbing Memphis schools (and state dollars) and turning them over to charters for six years.

Matt’s research roundup

Scores (and hard work) on international tests pay off. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which shows that a country’s overall performance predicts economic growth — but so does students’ persistence over the course of a lengthy exam, which the researchers see as a measure of their “non-cognitive” skills. That give more credence to concerns from a long list of policymakers — including, most recently, Betsy DeVos — about the U.S.’s mediocre international rankings.

The worst principals aren’t sticking around. School principals don’t get studied nearly as much as teachers do, so a recent paper caught our eye. Focusing on Tennessee, the research found that less effective school leaders were especially likely to leave the job, often to take an assistant principal or classroom teacher position. That’s good news for students, as long as new principals are better than the ones they replaced. The best principals also had slightly higher-than-average turnover, in part because they were often promoted to central office positions.

Update: CHIP gets a six-year extension. Last week, we wrote about the research showing that children benefit educationally from health insurance programs. This week, as part of a deal to end the government shutdown, the Children’s Health Insurance Program was extended for six years.

Names to note

TNTP President Karolyn Belcher is stepping down in April and says she hopes to “lead an urban school district.” Jeffrey Villar will be the state-appointed “receiver” of schools in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Angélica Infante-Green is the subject of a campaign to make her New York City schools chief. Erika Soto Lamb is Democrats for Education Reform’s new national director for strategic communications.

DeVos watch

At an event held by a conservative legal group last week, DeVos was asked what she would do to promote the teaching of evolution in schools, presumably as opposed to creationism. “I’m not an advocate of any kind of national curriculum,” she said in response. “I continue to encourage the most local level to be able to have the kind of flexibility to meet individual students’ needs.”

The portfolio push

In Indianapolis, where the central school district is a darling of portfolio model advocates, nearly 4,000 students used a unified enrollment system for district and charter schools — the system’s first test. The state also released new data this week showing that only 55 percent of students who live in the Indianapolis Public School boundaries attend district schools.

Denver Public Schools has faced criticism from from national portfolio advocates and local charter leaders for not calling for new schools or expansion of charters this year. Our reporter Melanie Asmar breaks down the debate with responses from charter schools and the district.

The Memphis Education Fund — a member of a network of groups known as Education Cities, which supports the portfolio model — is working on principal training, teacher recruitment, helping single-site charter schools, and boosting reading skills among the city’s youngest students.

What we’re reading

Teen pregnancy has plunged, but students who have kids of their own still struggle to graduate. Hechinger Report

The school board in Evanston, Illinois, is hiring a “director of black student success.” Daily Northwestern

Bullied students may soon be eligible for private-school vouchers in Florida. Tampa Bay Times

A leader of the Democracy Prep charter network is in a public debate with students about the importance of “standard English.” Democracy Prep

San Antonio is set to allow Democracy Prep to take over a low-performing district school. Folo Media

Nearly 12,000 students are scrambling after the closure of online charter school Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. WOSU

KIPP is headed to Miami, even as one of its charter schools elsewhere in Florida has struggled. WLRN

A helpful (and wonky) overview of research on race and school discipline. Brookings

The head of the National Council for Teacher Quality says education reformers should keep the focus on improving schools, rather than addressing poverty or racism. NCTQ

Los Angeles’s school board may aim for a compromise pick for new schools head. EdSource

The education department has made it a mission to boost parent involvement in schools. Now, parents are demanding a bigger role elsewhere: In the search for a new schools chancellor.

Parent leaders from across New York City took to the steps of the education department’s headquarters to demand that Mayor Bill de Blasio allow them to have a say in the process.

“For the mayor to deny parents the opportunity to represent the interests of our children in this critical decision is to ignore the voices of our most vulnerable, underrepresented New Yorkers,” Jessamyn Lee, co-chair of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, said in a statement.

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Education news.In your inbox.

Organizers say about 30 members from a range of parent groups gathered in the rain to call on de Blasio to follow through on a campaign promise made during his first run for mayor.

Before he was was first elected, de Blasio said the city needed a school leader who would be “presented to the public, not just forced down our throat.” But he went on to conduct a hushed search, pulling department veteran Carmen Fariña from retirement to become chancellor.

Among the organizations represented at the rally were the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, which is made of leaders from school parent organizations; the Education Council Consortium, which represents members of the local Community and Citywide Education Councils; and the NYCKids PAC, a parent-led political committee. Those are not the only groups seeking more access and transparency in the hiring process. Advocates for different causes, including school integration efforts, have all called for the opportunity to weigh in.

One of those calls came this weekend in an online petition asking de Blasio to consider a well regarded state education official for the job. And the Coalition for Educational Justice, which held its own rally on Tuesday outside City Hall, is calling on the city to appoint a chancellor who “has a strong vision for racial justice in schools.” The organization has called on the city to focus on making sure that teachers have anti-bias training and that classrooms reflect all students’ cultures.